Prior Art Record

Use this skill when the user wants a public disclosure (a technical note, page, paper, or document the company has published) written up as a Prior Art Record, so an examiner or a challenger can find it and prove when it went public.

This skill is Labor as Code™ for the Prior Art Record in Discoverability Engineering. Labor as Code is a skill that encapsulates a person's knowledge, judgment, and skill in durable, inspectable, versioned form. The know-how is an operator's habit of asking of every published note, "Could a stranger find this, and could they prove the date?" and of writing the answer where the next person can read it.

The method comes from "Patents and Prior Art Are Public Evidence That Needs a Date Anyone Can Prove," with the record's fields defined there and its evidence rows in editorial-notes.md ledger D. Read the chapter for the argument and for Merriden's 2021 note, which this skill generalizes into a repeatable pass over the user's own disclosures. It does not retell the case.

This skill records and grades a disclosure. It does not give a legal opinion on whether the disclosure is prior art against any patent, it does not decide whether to publish anything, and it never invents a date, an author, a capture, or a classification code. A gap is a finding, and the skill reports it as one. The person who owns the disclosure and the patent attorney decide what the record means.

Before running

Confirm these points with the user before the first field:

1. Which disclosure, and why it matters. Get the address or the file itself. Ask whether the record is for a disclosure the company already published or one it is about to publish. A record for an unpublished item is a plan, and the skill marks it PLANNED.
2. What the user can show about the date. Ask for archive captures, repository deposits, version histories, and any dated emails or posts. Use only what the user supplies or what the skill can open.
3. Who decides. Name the operator who owns the record and the attorney who reads the classification codes. If the company has no attorney, say so in the record.

Step 1: State what the disclosure teaches

1. Read the whole disclosure once before writing anything.
2. Write one sentence saying what it teaches, in the words a patent claim would use: the method, its steps, what it acts on, and the result. Do not use the disclosure's own marketing words.
3. Quote the passages that give the setup, the steps, and the values a reader needs to repeat the method. If there are none, write enabling: NO and name what is missing. A line that names a method without saying how to do it teaches nothing an examiner can cite.

Step 2: Record where it is published and who can reach it

For each address:

1. Record the address and the date the skill opened it.
2. Record access: public with no login and no notice, needs an account, or carries a confidentiality notice. Test it with an unauthenticated request. Do not rely on the user's browser session.
3. Record whether an ordinary link from the company's own site reaches it. A page with no incoming link is harder to find.
4. Note whether the file is text a machine can read. A scanned image fails.

Step 3: Date it with evidence the publisher does not control

1. Record first_public only from a source. Write UNKNOWN where none exists.
2. For each date, record its source and who controls it: a third-party archive capture, a repository or service that sets its own deposit date, a dated proceedings or journal record, or the page's own date line.
3. List every date that only the publisher controls under untrusted. A page's own "last updated" line, and any page edited in place, goes there.
4. Check the archive's capture history for the address and quote the earliest capture with its date. Do not assume a capture exists.
5. Never edit the page that carries the original date. If a better version is needed, the record lists it as a second entry with its own date and a link back to the original.

Step 4: Propose classification codes

1. Propose the Cooperative Patent Classification symbols that fit the teaching, from the scheme's own titles, and record the scheme version beside each symbol.
2. Mark every symbol PROPOSED. If no symbol fits the teaching well, say so and mark the class OPEN for the attorney.
3. Do not name a symbol for a standard the scheme does not name.

Step 5: Write the record and conclude

Write the record in specs/disclosure/prior-art-records.yaml:

- id: par-NNN
  teaches: ____
  published: [url, first_public, date_proof, untrusted, status]
  access: ____
  enabling: ____
  cpc: [____]   # scheme version; OPEN if unsure
  cited_against: ____
  owner: ____
  reviewed: ____

Then conclude in plain words, with reasons:

1. Where the disclosure stands on the five stages (found, understood, trusted, qualified as art, acted on), one sentence each, citing the field that decides it.
2. The weakest stage and the smallest fix for it: a dated new version that links to the original, an archive capture request, a repository deposit, or a claim-shaped title.
3. What only a person can settle: the classification codes, whether any part of the disclosure is export-controlled, and whether to publish a new version.

Where the evidence for a date is thin, say so plainly and name what would resolve it. Do not pick a date to sound useful.

What this skill does not do

• It does not decide that a disclosure is prior art against a patent.
• It does not publish, edit, or delete any page.
• It does not request an archive capture or make a deposit without the user's approval of the exact address.